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Image Processing and GD

Introduction

PHP is not limited to creating just HTML output. It can also be used to create and manipulate image files in a variety of different image formats, including GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP, and XPM. Even more conveniently, PHP can output image streams directly to a browser. You will need to compile PHP with the GD library of image functions for this to work. GD and PHP may also require other libraries, depending on which image formats you want to work with.

You can use the image functions in PHP to get the size of JPEG, GIF, PNG, SWF, TIFF and JPEG2000 images.

With the exif extension, you are able to work with information stored in headers of JPEG and TIFF images. This way you can read meta data generated by digital cameras. The exif functions do not require the GD library.

Note: Read the requirements section about how to expand image capabilities to read, write and modify images. To read meta data of pictures taken by digital cameras you need the above mentioned exif extension.

Note: The getimagesize() function does not require the GD extension.

Caution

While the bundled version of the GD library uses the Zend memory manager to allocate memory, system versions do not, so that memory_limit does not apply.

GD supports a varity of formats, below is a list of formats supported by GD and notes to their availability including read/write support.

Formats supported by GD
Format Read support Write support Notes
JPEG true true  
PNG true true  
GIF true true  
XBM true true  
XPM true false  
WBMP true true  
WebP true true  
BMP true true Available as of PHP 7.2.0

Despite most formats being available for both reading and writing in the above table, doesn't mean that PHP was compiled with support for them. To find out which formats that was available to GD during compilation, use the gd_info() function, for more information about compiling support for one or more formats, see the installation chapter.

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User Contributed Notes 5 notes

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5
kurdtpage at gmail dot com
14 years ago
When using GD, please make sure of the following things:

1. The file that is used to manipulate images is saved as ANSI format and not UTF-8
2. There is no space in front of the opening tag <?php
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3
mail at ecross dot nl
15 years ago
hello there,
i made a function to create a gradient image.

description:
gradient(int image_width, int image_height, 
int start_red, int start_green, int start_blue, 
int end_red, int end_green, int end_blue, 
bool vertical)

function:
<?php
function gradient($image_width, $image_height,$c1_r, $c1_g, $c1_b, $c2_r, $c2_g, $c2_b, $vertical=false)
{
// first: lets type cast;
$image_width = (integer)$image_width;
$image_height = (integer)$image_height;
$c1_r = (integer)$c1_r;
$c1_g = (integer)$c1_g;
$c1_b = (integer)$c1_b;
$c2_r = (integer)$c2_r;
$c2_g = (integer)$c2_g;
$c2_b = (integer)$c2_b;
$vertical = (bool)$vertical;

// create a image
$image  = imagecreatetruecolor($image_width, $image_height); 

// make the gradient
for($i=0; $i<$image_height; $i++) 
{ 
$color_r = floor($i * ($c2_r-$c1_r) / $image_height)+$c1_r;
$color_g = floor($i * ($c2_g-$c1_g) / $image_height)+$c1_g;
$color_b = floor($i * ($c2_b-$c1_b) / $image_height)+$c1_b;

$color = ImageColorAllocate($image, $color_r, $color_g, $color_b);
imageline($image, 0, $i, $image_width, $i, $color);
} 

# Prints out all the figures and picture and frees memory 
header('Content-type: image/png'); 

if($vertical){$image = imagerotate($image, 90, 0);}
ImagePNG($image); 
imagedestroy($image); 
}
?>
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2
Thomas
17 years ago
You know, maybe this goes without saying, but I thought I would drop a note in here.  When developing code to resize images, it is best not to use GD.  When using the current GD methodologies, you are reading content from an image and manipulating it.  By then writing that content to a brand new file, you are losing the EXIF data.

For purposes when you want to retain EXIF data, it is recommended that you compile in and use the PECL Imagick extension.  It has great resizing methods built right in and the EXIF data is retained.
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0
code at ashleyhunt dot co dot uk
17 years ago
I have been looking to send the output from GD to a text string without proxying via a file or to a browser.

I have come up with a solution.

This code buffers the output between the ob_start() and ob_end() functions into ob_get_contents()

See the example below

<?php
// Create a test source image for this example
$im = imagecreatetruecolor(300, 50);
$text_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 233, 14, 91);
imagestring($im, 1, 5, 5,  'A Simple Text String', $text_color);

// start buffering
ob_start();
// output jpeg (or any other chosen) format & quality
imagejpeg($im, NULL, 85);
// capture output to string
$contents = ob_get_contents();
// end capture
ob_end_clean();

// be tidy; free up memory
imagedestroy($im);

// lastly (for the example) we are writing the string to a file
$fh = fopen("./temp/img.jpg", "a+" );
    fwrite( $fh, $contents );
fclose( $fh );
?> 

Enjoy!
Ashley
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-1
herbert dot walde at googlemail dot com
14 years ago
In case your script is using output-buffering-functions somewhere, then you have to clear the buffer first ( with ob_clear() ), before outputting an image with a function like imagepng(). 

And you should make sure that no buffer will get send after outputing an image by using the ob_end_flush()-function.

Furthermore you should check if a buffer has already been flushed somewhere before. This can be done using the headers_sent()-function.

Here is the full solution:

<?php
if(headers_sent()){
    die('Headers have been send somewhere within my script');
}

ob_clean(); //Clears the buffer

header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($img, NULL, 0,  NULL);

ob_end_flush(); //Now we send the header and image plus we make sure that nothing will get send from now on (including possible shutdown-functions and __destruct()-methods) till the end of page-execution
?>
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